Horrified by the skin-lightening creams you see advertised in the cityscapes of Africa?
Wait till you see the adverts people walk past daily in India or Sri Lanka. This huge billboard (above) sits somewhere on the 10-kilometre distance from Kelaniya (my family’s ancestral home) to Colombo (the city). The script below the ever-whitening out images of the model says: “For white/light skin, apply daily”.
South Asians have Africans beat on this front.
Many of you know those spectacular images of burning computer parts and beautiful, sad young men, taken in some God-forsaken corner of polluted Ghana where the ‘West’ has dumped all its obsolete toys to be ‘recycled’.
Now, here’s Southern Africa’s answer: we can do apocalyptic burning and degraded human beings on rubbish tips, too. Portuguese photographer Jose Ferreira’s images of the “Trashland of Maputo” , taken in the dump of Huléne (just a few meters from Maputo’s airport), are supposedly meant to make us move beyond the “caricatures of the poor and homeless, who are often camouflaged between common jokes and cartoons from the civilized world.” He adds that the people in these images, “who have empty eyes and shapeless smiles,” make the experience of their lives “more human.”
It’s not that lives like this do not exist; it’s not that this is a compelling subject (why do we allow such suffering? Why permit such degradation in fellow human beings?), or unworthy task to force those who are either ignorant of such suffering, or usually like to turn the other way to really stand and contemplate the lived reality of these Others. It may be that Ferreira makes us think about all that we discard. But there’s something that’s rehashed here – too much of the whiff of exploitation, for the value of shock, rather than an invitation into a space of contemplation (and possibly, towards action).
And please: I know this isn’t about computer parts, or the discards of the West. But if you want to make your mark as photographer, why copy Pieter Hugo’s “Permanent Error“?
From May this year: “… an unrehearsed, first-take cut” of Nicolas Jaar‘s remix (recorded in London) of Abdullah Ibrahim’s jazz track “Ishmael”.
Via Pitchfork
Years ago, during my first years as a hired hand in academia, I was more careful about doing The Right Thing. I’d read JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as a student, and something clicked for me – the colonial mentality, the hopeless fantasies of each successive militarised ‘civilisation’ – in a way that no amount of theory had done. I became an instant acolyte of the Master’s writing. In 2005, attended my first JM Coetzee conference, at Royal Holloway: the university for those sons and daughters of the wealthy who didn’t make it to the Oxbridge universities (this according to a friend who went to Oxford on scholarship).
Anyhow, it was an all-white affair. I was the token brown person there, except for a British Indian student who flitted in and out of a few sessions. (Another academic leaned over and said, conspiratorially, that this young man sends him “fawning emails”. Right. Not only was I being handed the ubiquitous racist caricature of the arse-kissing Indian, but I was being invited into the ‘club’: my sarcasm had permitted me to leap over the Indian hurdle, and into white acceptability. Goody for me.) During a couple of sessions, when some students from continental Europe were presenting (albeit somewhat poorly constructed papers), the UK-and South Africa-based white academics trashed them publicly, right there during the session. This was not a place to come to be informed, gently directed, or invited to an ongoing conversation, but a location in which territory was reinforced, and the ‘right’ of the few to belong staked out.
At the end of the conference, everyone gathered in the large auditorium to take a group photo. I didn’t get in on that. Someone asked me why I didn’t want to be in the picture, and I said that it was because I’d lose my Coloured People’s Credentials. Weirdly enough, though my own paper was quite rubbish (it was my first year as an academic, and I spent a lot of time writing drivel), I was invited to send in a revised version for a collection of essays, compiled from that conference. I never could get motivated to do it. I guess I realised, even then, that I was being asked to be the Sole Brown Representative in a book of essays about JM Coetzee. I couldn’t do it.
Instead, I wrote about how that experience taught me a thing or two about the reification of ‘white’ culture by scholars of Southern African literature, via the objectification of JM Coetzee – using his person, as well as his writing. I presented that paper at a Chimurenga Session in 2009, in Cape Town. It was a liberating experience.
Not personally in love with the song, and I get this feeling all the way through that I want to hear the music the dancers are actually moving to, but this is great slow motion footage of “street” dancers in Rwanda and Burundi.
The famine in the Horn of Africa has revived the debate about “starvation photography.” The blog of the Irish NGO, Dóchas, has compiled the different viewpoints in one place.
* Related: What groundbreaking images of ‘Africa’ can we expect this year from The International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan, France?, asks Duck Rabbit. Sadly, more of the same.
* Jonathan Faull sent in this item on parachute journalism at its “best” featured on CNN’s website: “Photographer captures ‘unbreakable spirit’ in West Africa“
Photographer “Thomas Nybo has captured images of some of the toughest issues facing Africa, from child mortality to access to education” presumably during his indepth understanding of the continent gleaned from his extensive understanding of the “five countries he recently visited in 11 days.”
Nybo also takes the obligatory photo of himself posing with children. (What is it with foreign correspondents posing with children all the time. The adults don’t like you?) As Jonathan remarked: Watch the video for some spectacularly patronizing nonsense.
Why not start the celebration of Burkina Faso’s Independence with an explosive live performance by rapper Art Melody. (You gotta love his t-shirt!)
Back in the states, I’m going to be able to fulfill my promise to post on Liberian music, and the vibrant growing scene there. I’m publishing another couple of articles for Cluster Mag about it, and am really excited about a compilation Akwaaba Music and I have decided to put together. So keep a look out for those.
In the meantime, enjoy this track from John Beadle’s African Diva’s Compilation Vol. 1.
Most of the information on the Liberian music industry available on the web is from artists that were recording before the war and who have since left. Princess Gayflor is one of those artists. Read about her here.
Earlier this year, while I was in Cape Town, I interviewed Emma Bedford, a specialist in painting, watercolours, drawings, prints and sculpture at Strauss and Co., fine art auctioneers based in Cape Town. I asked her about what sort of artwork investors were interested in buying, and what these purchases indicated about South Africa’s vision of ‘art’. In the imaginary of the ‘Captains of Industry’ who arrive at auction, ready to compete for a prized piece, what was a valuable piece? What was art, in their eyes?
I met Emma many years back, as a newcomer to Cape Town, when she was Senior Curator and Head of the Curatorial Departments at the Iziko South African Gallery. I had no connections and couldn’t do anything to promote artists, artwork or the gallery. I think I had on a $20 red H&M hoodie.
“In South Africa,” anthropologist Jean Comaroff tells us in this lecture, “murder rates are held to be diagnostic of violence run amok, of governance haunted by a past of inequities that no constitutional reform, no right of reconciliation can fully dispel. Especially indicative is the failure of the police to protect the populace, to win the war between crime and punishment that for many has turned the post-colony into a Hobbesian war zone.” When this obsessive drama of crime and punishment grips the South African imaginary at all levels, it edges aside older fantasies like ‘the rainbow nation’, or ‘a people born in struggle’. South Africans believe their country to be exceptionally violent, “captured by images of law and disorder (the more dire the better)” but “the public fixation far exceeds the facticity of crime” (more people die of AIDS, traffic accidents or heart disease than of criminal violence — thus making it a very unexceptional society in comparison to countries that share a similar past or transitional conundrum). But audacious crime fascinates, Comaroff argues, as does the figure of the ‘diviner-detective’ (think: renegade policemen like Jackson Gopane, or Kobus ‘Donker’ Jonker who combines a fascination for the occult with the ordinary police-work, or the now-disbanded ‘super-cops’ of the Scorpions) — the ‘diviner-detective’ who seems to be an embodiment of the paradoxes of law, order, and sovereignty in places where faith in the ability to explain lawlessness is lost, and with it possibly the nature of society itself. Recommended listening, if you like a good dose of anthropology.
